Xamarin Releases New Guides with Samples Based on Evolve 2013 Training Sessions

Xamarin documentation team recently released new guides and samples about activity lifecycle, backgrounding, notifications, touch, memory and performance including materials for graphics and animation APIs for Android and iOS. The new materials have been released using the inputs made available from the Evolve 2013 training sessions.

The activity lifecycle guide covers activity states, activity re-creation in response to configuration changes, activity lifecycle methods such as OnCreate(), OnStart(), OnResume(), OnPause(), OnStop(), OnDestroy() and OnRestart. It also dicusses state management with reference to OnSaveInstanceState () and OnRestoreInstanceState() methods.

The Notifications topic examines third party libraries which simplifies sending remote notifications such as PushSharp, Urban Airship and Windows Azure. On the other hand, touch chapter provides information about the usage of touch functionality in both iOS and Android.

As mentioned previously, the guide include coverage of graphics and animation for both Android and iOS platforms. While Android section examines 2D Graphics, drawable resources with the help of a sample demo app including the usage of Canvas Drawing API, Animation part covers View, Property and Drawable animation APIs. You will also learn the usage of ValueAnimator, ObjectAnimator and Drawable Animations.

The iOS portion of graphics and animation provides a comprehensive material related to Core Graphics such as drawing to the screen via a UIView, drawing images in memory or on screen, creation and drawing to a PDF file and reading and drawing an existing PDF file. You will also find a new guide which examines drawing and animating along a path.

Xamarin also released a guide on iOS maps which examines MapKit framework, map style, panning, zooming, user location, annotations, overlays and local search. You will also learn the steps required to add, reuse annotations in addition to customization of Callout.

Finally, a comprehensive guide on instruments walkthrough has also been released which examines the usage of Apple’s Instruments tool to diagnose memory issues in an iOS application built with Xamarin. You will also learn how to launch Instruments, take heap snapshots and analyze memory growth.